With Santa Fe, Hyundai Completes Fluidic Transformation

Hyundai’s new Santa Fe, with hexagonal grille and fluidic lines that are less pronounced than some other cars in the lineup.

With the launch of a new Santa Fe SUV in New York on Wednesday, a multi-year design makeover of Hyundai Motor Co.’s cars is essentially complete. Its designers are now working on the second act.

About five years ago, Hyundai designers and management decided to finally tackle their identity issue, which was the lack of one. There wasn’t a way to immediately spot a Hyundai car on the road, the way one can with a BMW, Audi, Buick or even Toyota.

The solution was a design concept dubbed “fluidic sculpture.” The main elements: arched lines that appear to flow aerodynamically from a point at the front-center of the car, contrasting surfaces, headlights that looked like eagle eyes.

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The ideas first took form in the Sonata sedan released at the end of 2009, which was dramatically different from its predecessor. They’ve quickly spread through the rest of the line-up, with even the boxy Equus luxury sedan getting some angled flair. Recently, Hyundai said that it would revamp the Sonata for the 2014 model year, meaning the existing model will have had a lifecycle of just four years, relatively short for mid-range cars.

But there’s a danger that taking a single look too far would damage, rather than enhance, Hyundai’s sales. Buyers of $35,000 and $50,000 cars don’t necessarily want their car to carry the same lines as one that sells for less than $10,000. (Indeed, the sculpted lines of Hyundai’s new Santa Fe are less extreme than on some other models.)

That’s a risk that BMW, Buick and the like don’t face because their range of vehicles is more limited. Even Hyundai’s sister company Kia, which itself is on a streak of design successes, competes in fewer model categories.

“Hyundai has an extensive line-up within a single brand portfolio,” said Casey Hyun, a Hyundai designer. “We needed to create design distinction within each segment.”

As the designers started to refine the fluidic sculpture concept, they settled on a distinction that is starting play out in the “refreshes” and updates of the vehicles. The distinction generally works like this:

Inexpensive sedans and all SUVs are getting a grille, or front face, that is shaped like a hexagon.

Mid-line and high-end sedans are getting a grille with a wing-shaped span.

The idea is that the hexagonally shaped grille is perceived as younger and sportier-looking. Next year, Hyundai will emphasize the six-sided shape even more by dropping the cross bar that’s in many of its hexagonal grilles today.

And the wing-shaped grille is considered to be more refined, stable and reinforces the aerodynamic look that the company has been trying to make its signature.

Courtesy Hyundai America

The Santa Fe launch event at the New York Auto Show on Wednesday.

There are exceptions to Hyundai’s rules of the grille. Some inexpensive cars in China, where Hyundai is a brand that drivers aspire to in a greater degree than elsewhere, will get the wing-shaped grille. And hybrid cars, for the moment, are getting the sporty hexagonal grille no matter where they fit in the lineup.

The trick, says Oh Suk-geun, a senior executive vice president and chief designer at Hyundai, is to create a system that allows designers to exercise their individual creativity. But he said, “The designers need a common direction.”

One sign of their success, Hyundai’s designers said, is that a search of the term “fluidic” on the images section of Google Inc.’s Web search engine immediately returns pictures of their cars.

Courtesy Hyundai America

The Azera sedan, called the Grandeur in South Korea, has the wing-shaped grille that Hyundai considers more refined.